Thomas the Tank Engine appears to have agency but he also has an engineer. How much of his sense of control is an illusion? These are the questions I ask now that I have a 2 year old. Is this philosophy? Am I a philosopher now?

Psychologists should found “participant island,” where we strand a large representative sample of people who must complete our tasks to earn airdrops of food and water. If you’re really good you get to temporarily board the Neuroimaging yacht

This is not a good time to be me, a guy who needs to buy a lot of memory

This is over x2 the FY2026 budget for all of NIH.

I wish the world would stop tempting me to have opinions about soccer

Not a great economy alert! Wall Street Bets users think Palantir spiked today because The Onion story titled “Palantir Acquires Pentagon for $800 Billion” hit their front page. They’re guessing trading bots indexed the top post on the subreddit reddit not understanding source.

I spent the last month obsessed with finding colors that can't be displayed on a conventional screen. This is what I found. moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/w...

An I missing something or are all the available current Python-based MVPA libraries painfully slow vs Matlab implementations like Cosmo? Searchlights take forever. PyMVPA was fast but it has gotten crusty. Python makes me sad.

We are recruiting new students for our NSF-funded Bridge Program at University of Delaware this year. The positions are fully funded for 2 years and the summer bridging those years. To receive funding applicants must be residents of an NSF EPSCOR jurisdiction. Questions? email me [email protected]

Saying I have to read the things I cite is discrimination against me, an academic who can't read

We are recruiting new students for our NSF-funded Bridge Program at University of Delaware this year. The positions are fully funded for 2 years and the summer bridging those years. To receive funding applicants must be residents of an NSF EPSCOR jurisdiction. Questions? email me [email protected]

I have to admit I've rarely seen much practical value in modeling data trial-by-trial (e.g. hierarchical model), in terms of basic effects. It's work and confusing and usually supports the same basic inferences. BUT when you're interested in cross-task correlation, the benefits are bananas good.

I’m starting to wonder if this maintenance was really scheduled for this time

FWIW, I don’t think the major problem in my field, or related ones, is that people need to move faster & produce more. I read a lot of papers as part of the job, and I’m increasingly convinced we’d benefit from fewer papers and better ones, not more mediocre work produced ever more “efficiently.”

There is so much about this interaction that basically perfectly sums up the bizarre stupidity of this era.

Me: I voted for Donald Trump because I had him confused with that other guy. Donald Duck. NYT reporter: Are you sure you want me to print that next to your real name and a drawing of you? Me: Yes.

Something instead of nothing

Browser-based explanation of the basic classification algorithms commonly used in MVPA, for a grad course I'm teaching this fall. You can click to add data points in different patterns, see algorithm's response, and compare algorithms' performance.

The low interest in studying these drugs amongst non-medical psych and neuro researchers baffles me. Perhaps it's the barriers. But I don't think the folks rooted in medical disciplines are gonna do a great job of studying effects on body image, productivity, relationships, social life, memory...

I wanted a way to explore Unicode by visual similarity, not just by name or codepoint, so I built Charcutrie. It lets you browse characters that look alike, search across scripts and symbols, and even sketch a shape to find matching glyphs. (pretty badly for now :D) charcuterie.elastiq.ch#U+221E

“Experts are dubious.”

Bluesky compression destroys it but here's a link to a random dot autostereogram animation. I mean come on. cogneurolab.org/PSYC310/rds_...

If I ever become an Editor-in-Chief, first of all, stage an intervention. But if the intervention fails, my first new policy will be that for any paper to be considered the authors need to identify 40 potential reviewers.

She moves to Prague to escape her onerous student loan. Her monthly payment? $60. And after 20 years the balance would have been forgiven. Sorry but that is just…hilarious?

Random-dot stereogram generator made in Claude in minutes (crossed/uncrossed/anaglyph). I know people have a lot of feelings about AI but I could spend my whole day doing stupid things like this. claude.ai/public/artif...

Visual #workingmemory peeps, you're going to love this. This is super challenging - might give you pause on how we are measuring color memory... My color memory is a 40.4/50. Please do worse so I feel better. dialed.gg?c=3PCHDE

Cool stuff chenglou.me/pretext/

Insel sucked and no one person should be able to have this kind of impact on science funding

Make your face or any face a Thatcher illusion...mobile-friendly...thanks Claude. cogneurolab.org/PSYC310/that...

Ah yes, that is why he was known as James “The Bean” Spader, so synonymous he became with that very famous show that existed in 1995.

And yet there are plenty of “legitimate” scientists that voluntarily go on @hubermanlab.com podcast implicitly promoting exactly this grift!

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

I haven't extensively debugged this yet but it's fun. Play as Hubel & Wiesel and determine the RF properties of a V1 neuron. cogneurolab.org/PSYC310/v1-r...

(Perceptual) space and time are warped by the gravity of objects and events in their vicinity. There's been a flurry of work recently documenting examples of this gravity, all resulting in some really neat illusions. @brynnsherman.bsky.social and I discuss all of those, here: rdcu.be/e5SWo

Another S&P demo courtesy of Claude: Receptive fields (RGCs/LGN center-surround): cogneurolab.org/PSYC310/rece...

Come and join OPAM as an organizer for 2026/7!!🎉 We are still looking for two new early career researchers (phd/postdoc) to join the OPAM team to help run everyones favorite one day miniconference! Express your interest by this weekend!

What you idiot commies don’t understand is that if we tax rich people they will JUST LEAVE, depriving our nation of tax cheats, political bribery, and national acts of perversion

One of the funniest, dumbest things I persistently see online as a dad of a toddler is that you should not tell a child “good job!” They don’t have a job, you see. It’s very confusing for them.

“I don’t think he’s colorblind he knows all these colors. Show me green!” He picks up green and red.

Another fun vision demo (Dan Kersten et al's shadow demo) that Claude generated in less than a minute. cogneurolab.org/demos/kerste...

A little live demo to accompany the SDT explorer tool. Again made by Claude but was a tougher lift. It's not perfect but probably adequate for in-class demo. cogneurolab.org/PSYC310/SDT_...

Claude Opus 4.6 w/ extended thinking is kind of insanely great at making little web demos and such. This is the kind of thing it one-shots -- a little Signal Detection Theory explorer. I hand coded something like this a while back and people were enthusiastic. I'd be embarrassed to link it here.

That they think they can outthink all the scientists on earth because their contrarian thinking is a super power is a kind of absurdist comedy for me.

One of my favorite little tests for new AI models is to ask it to make a program that will generate an illusion like Kitaoka's Rotating Snakes illusion. None of them have been able to do it for me, until now -- this one is close. I get some illusory motion with defaults. claude.ai/public/artif...

Heard about this on NPR. I would bet big money that this will not hold up. The effect size strains the bounds of credulity.

This should be fun. Or horrible. www.moltbook.com

Just a big congrats to everyone participating in the “babies make angry YouTube videos about baby things” art project today, this is a quality bit of comedy

I’m writing a horror novel called The Toddler, the Grant Deadline, and the 2-feet-of-snow Forecast

I’ve always thought adding a year to the tenure clock per child born was a good idea, but now that I have a toddler I think it should be 5 years.

Investigating individual-specific topographic organization has traditionally been a resource-intensive and time-consuming process. But what if we could map visual cortex organization in thousands of brains? Here we offer the community with a toolbox that can do just that! tinyurl.com/deepretinotopy